Sports in brief: Patrick reportedly to race

Danica Patrick is expected to announce today if she will enter the Nationwide Series race at Daytona International Speedway, but ESPN reports that she has already decided to race.

JR Motorsports has said it will be up to Patrick to decide if she wants to make her NASCAR debut in Saturday’s second-tier series race at Daytona.

After she rallied from a midrace spin in Saturday’s ARCA race at Daytona to finish sixth, the buzz has been growing that Patrick will indeed enter the Nationwide race. Her first Nationwide race was originally to be on Feb. 20 in California.

From wire reports

Florida State announced Sunday it will vacate 12 football victories and a 2007 men’s track national championship in an academic cheating scandal, along with dozens more victories and placings across 10 men’s and women’s sports.

The NCAA stripped the school of wins in which 61 athletes implicated in the scandal contributed. Bobby Bowden, who retired after this season as the second all-time winningest coach in major college football behind Penn State’s Joe Paterno (394), has now won a few less. Bowden finished with 389 before subtracting the 12 victories.

Associated Press

A ban on the three-point stance? NFL commissioner Roger Goodell says it’s possible.

Concerned about concussions, Goodell said the league will keep looking for ways to make the game safer. Speaking on CBS’s “Face the Nation” hours before the Super Bowl, he didn’t rule out the idea of banning the three-point stance for linemen to reduce the ferocity of collisions at the line.

“As you’ll see tonight, you’ll see a lot of players that never get down in a three-point stance,” Goodell said Sunday. “So it’s possible that would happen.”

Associated Press